Model Citizens

Tyra Banks lines up the future of fashion.

By Nancy Franklin

The New Yorker

If you watched the first episode of the fourth installment of UPN’s “America’s Next Top Model” last week, you may have noticed that I was not one of the contestants competing for the hundred-thousand-dollar contract with Cover Girl cosmetics, the model-management contract with Ford Models, and the spread in Elle, even though I fulfilled many of the show’s stated eligibility requirements: I am not currently a candidate for public office; I am not shorter than five feet seven; my age is between eighteen and twenty-seven if you divide it by any number between 1.778 and 2.667; and, to the best of my recollection, I have not had previous experience as a model in a national campaign within the past five years. As for the stipulation that applicants must “exhibit . . . a willingness to share their most private thoughts in an open forum of strangers,” is there anyone left on the planet who doesn’t fit into this category? Also, I can totally work it, bring it, feel it, slam it, serve it, and own it—to use the terms that the fashion photographers, advisers, and judges fall back on when coaching the contestants or explaining their decision to keep them on the show or boot them.

The reason I’m not on the show is that I didn’t want a tarantula crawling on my face; I’m funny that way. In a photo shoot for a jewelry ad in the third installment of “A.N.T.M.,” last fall, the models had to pose with a tarantula, either on or near their face. In one shot, the huge beast adjusts itself so that one leg is on the girl’s eyelid and another is in the corner of her mouth. Another girl—the one with the most assertive personality—freaks out and cries, because she’s terrified of spiders and so much rides on her being able to act like a pro. The contestants all regularly comment on one another to the camera, and one of them says during this scene, “Eva’s really stressing. She’s worried that her inability to perform with the spider on her face is going to send her home, so I don’t think that she really is cut out to be America’s Next Top Model.” Since I, too, have an inability to perform with spiders on my face, I thought I wasn’t cut out for it, either. But Eva was able to pull herself together, and she looked gorgeous in her picture with Spidey—and she went on to win the entire competition. So I guess I should have gone ahead and sent in an application, arachnophobia be damned.

The supermodel Tyra Banks created “America’s Next Top Model,” and she is also the host and one of the show’s executive producers. The aspiring models view her both as the bearer of a magic ticket out of poverty, obscurity, stripping, or waitressing and as a comforting, maternal, Oprah-like figure. Even while she is pondering which chick will be thrown out of the nest each week, Banks dispenses plentiful hugs to her charges, at one point getting down on a bathroom floor to console a distressed girl. During each episode, she makes sure the contestants understand the hardships of the modelling life—facing rejection, working in countries where they don’t speak the language, putting makeup on in a moving limousine—and gives them the kind of challenges they would face as pros, such as wearing stiletto heels while posing in a bikini on volcanic rock along the coast of Jamaica. Oh, my God—now I’m crying.

One refreshing aspect of “A.N.T.M.” is that there is more diversity among the contestants than one usually sees in reality shows. In the last series, or “cycle,” there was an Indian woman, and all the cycles have featured several black semi-finalists, as well as a couple of plus-size hopefuls. (The show has not, however, stepped up—to use another of its recurring exhortatory phrases— 2 when it comes to Asian and Latino women. Not that United Nations-style casting guarantees loftiness or anything. The Indian woman believed that she was “setting a goal for Indians: They’re either engineers or doctors. But we can go outside of that. We can use our intelligence in this industry.”) Banks, who has healthy, womanly curves, has included cautionary tales relating to the body-image problems that occur in the modeling business; the last cycle had a finalist who was a half inch under six feet tall and weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, and another confessed to having problems with food, though she balked at the label “bulimic,” because she didn’t throw up after every single meal. Comments about the tall drink of water were left to the girls, who all live together for eight weeks and have the usual fights and dish the usual dirt on one another; for the model who was avowedly obsessed with thinness, Banks brought in a nutritionist, but the young woman resisted help—an accurate illustration of the difficulty that even experts often have in treating such disorders. It’s hard not to think, though, that it was a little unfair to the extreme cases to let them get so far along in the competition, since they didn’t have the remotest chance of winning; they’re there, it seems, mainly to short-circuit potential complaints from viewers who may consider the modeling profession itself partly responsible for the fact that so many young women hate their bodies.

Much as Banks wants to come across as a hey-girlfriend confidante to the contestants, she in fact heightens the atmosphere of anxiety, by drawing out the elimination at the end of each episode for as long as possible, and by emphasizing that the loser will have to leave “immediately.” For some contestants, immediately may not be soon enough. One girl from Oklahoma, after living in a gigantic suite at the Waldorf-Astoria for a while, had simply had it. “In Oklahoma, people look at me,” she said. “I don’t feel like people are looking at me here. I’m not having that much fun.” While the opportunity these women are angling for is real, and even has benefits for the losers— two of whom appeared on UPN sitcoms last week—you can’t help wondering why they want it so much, when success in the world they’re trying to enter seems to hinge on how much of themselves they can make disappear. In this week’s episode, Banks says to the girls, “Part of being a top model is about being a blank palette.” And the stylist for the photo shoots, Jay Manuel, says after a session, “My concern with Toccara is that she allows too much of her personality to get in the way.” At one point during a shoot, when a model strikes a less than erect pose, she is rewarded with this evaluation: “I love the broken-down-doll look.” In the third cycle, the girls have to walk into a room wearing high heels that are two sizes too small and a dress that is too tight—the point being that a model has to smile through all kinds of discomfort. Nolé Marin, the fashion director of a magazine for gay men, and one of the arbiters of style who sit in judgment at the end of each episode—the others are Banks, a photographer named Nigel Barker, and the former supermodel Janice Dickinson—says to one of the less graceful girls, “You look like the broken Tin Man. You needed a major oil job.” Sometimes looking broken is good; sometimes it’s not. It’s all so confusing! This is actually among the most humane comments heard during the series from Marin, who is—and let’s ourselves be fashion judges for a moment here—a chubby little bespectacled bald man with an unattractive soul patch. None of the judges offer much in the way of constructive criticism; it’s always either “I’m loving the look, honey. I’m loving the look” or “Lose the pearls! Ugh! This is a model contest, not a secretary contest.” (And yet—one more schmatte in the bundle of contradictions that is the fashion world—Mikimoto pearls are given out as a reward to a couple of the models.) Dickinson is a stun gun in human form, zealously zapping the girls as they parade before her. Referring to a picture of the bulimic woman, who is five feet ten, weighs a hundred and thirty pounds, and has a flat stomach, she says, “You look about two months pregnant there.”

“America’s Next Top Model” is fascinating, if you like trying to figure out life’s little mysteries, such as how it could possibly be that someone has “wanted to model since I was three years old,” and why models are trained to walk like people who have hip dysplasia. If you already think 3 that models are vacuous, apparently you are not alone: even models themselves make that assumption. As one of the contestants, who is surprised (and shouldn’t be) by how much Banks has on the ball, says, “I mean, you see Tyra, and you think boobs and lingerie. And she’s got a brain—I mean, who woulda thought?